Get a taste of Iceland’s surprisingly robust house music scene (at least on the production end) with Homegrown, a three track EP featuring the island’s brightest lights. ILO, Intr0beatz and Felix Leifur are all familiar names to anyone that taps into the current mainline of deep house, but it’s the nature of the business these days that Chicago producers will appear most often on labels based in Amsterdam and Icelandic producers on UK and Berlin-based imprints.
ILO’s “Only Someone Real” hogs up the entire A side of the record with “Only Someone Real,” a sleazy, hypnotic disco-tinged jam. For this alone it’s worth buying the record – I don’t think any DJ can have too many 17 minute tracks on wax and the possibilities of mixing into, out of and back in to this one are limitless and thrilling. The B side gives you a breather with Intr0beatz‘s slow churning “Fu Banco” and Felix Leifur (whose cut Hamburg 3011 on Dirt Crew recently made our ListenUp feature on 5mag.net) with the funky but disjointed “Transit.”
The last 15 years has been characterized by a relentlessly global push which has homogenized the sound of dance music in the way nations once standardized dialects into a common language. I think the next 15 will see a correction, with tight-knit microscenes breaking out in circumstances that could hardly be called commercial and likely resistant to monetization, even while ludicrous blockbuster stars dominate the media. Records like this were once common and will likely become common again. It’s vinyl-only, so get it while you can.
Homegrown EP Vol 1 / Borg
A1. ILO – “Only Someone Real” (16:58)
B1. Intr0beatz – “Fu Banco” (7:07)
B2. Felix Leifur – “Transit” (5:37)
